


Barefoot

by protect-him (protect_him)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 13:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12254940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protect_him/pseuds/protect-him
Summary: Doing an inktober writing project to write a little "drabble" each day (a long drabble). This is day 2, and the prompt was "Barefoot"Was talking to some other fans and it seemed that there was some desire for a post-breakup fic, and so this is intended to hopefully fit that category.





	Barefoot

It only took two three-hour sessions for their friends to convince Fenris to go after Anders.

The break-up had been painful for both of them, but as Anders was somewhere—no one knew where—Fenris was the one who was told to go after his lover.

In the end, the prospect of getting out of the filthy city and of looking for Anders seemed a much more pleasurable concept. More pleasurable than getting drunk each night.

And just like that, he was gone. One day Fenris was there in his mansion, and the next he was nowhere to be found in Kirkwall.

He walked alone with only a small pack. He wasn’t a hunter, had no idea how to find where Anders had gone, or who to ask that might possibly know.

It took months for Fenris to track Anders down. He was acutely aware of how much he missed the mage—Anders. Fenris didn’t like to cry, but he found himself bawling in rented rooms and in his sleeping roll under the trees. It would come upon him suddenly, and always the smallest things.

The inn that gave him a double bed and two extra pillows. Anders always wanted extra pillows. Fenris cried over that.

When the sun had been behind the clouds all day, but at sunset it came out to spill glorious colors over the landscape and the undebellies of the darkening clouds, sunbeams filtering through tree branches in such clear relief that it looked like you could reach out and stroke them. Fenris did try, dipping his fingers into a sunbeam and watching the way it turned his skin golden brown and made the lyrium look like liquid sunlight. He cried over that sunset too.

He cried over Anders’ pillow, over and over. Probably unintentionally, Anders had left the embroidered pillow that had been in his possession ever since before he was taken away to the circle. Hawke had found it when she was cleaning out the old clinic—a place Fenris hadn’t dared go, for fear of crying there as well. Sadness had never been a familiar emotion for Fenris, and now it was his most familiar.

The pillow seemed a compass to Fenris, and though he held it often as he slept, he also carried it gently, carefully, knowing that it was precious to Anders, and a memoir from his childhood.

Holding fast to thin hope and a threadbare pillow as his talisman, Fenris trudged onwards, bare feet tracking across mud, dirt, and stone.

* * *

Anders on the other hand, was undertaking no such journey. He traveled when he felt like it. The discarding of his staff and robes made him much less conspicuous, and so long as he was careful not to cast magic, no one suspected him as a mage, much less the mage who had blown up the Kirkwall chantry. To say Anders reveled in the anonymity would not be accurate. It made him less cautious, but he was far from happy, free-spirited as he was now.

He missed Fenris. Unlike the elf, sadness was an emotion that Anders wore close to the surface. He had always cried more frequently than many others, and that propensity had not diminished. The things that made Anders cry made him think of Fenris, but in roundabout ways.

That happy young couple holding hands. Anders would hold Fenris’s hand now were he here. He brushed a stray tear from his cheek and hurried in the opposite direction.

The smell of fish in a coastal market. Fenris hated fish. Anders found a lonely corner behind some barrels and had a good cry over the fish. He emerged looking somewhat more ragged and purchased some fish for his supper. He swallowed past the lump in his throat.

But it was better this way, Anders told himself. Fenris deserved a happy, stable life. After everything he’d been through, Fenris deserved the mansion, cards every week with his friends, and the small luxuries of freedom. Fenris’s life was better without Anders in it. Either Anders would have had to live in hiding in Kirkwall, or Fenris would have had to pick up again and run with him.

Anders had foreseen all of this before the event with the chantry. He’d broken up with Fenris, neither of them wanting it, but Anders knew it had to be done.

What was done, was done, he reminded himself again. He wouldn’t have to think about it much longer. He was nearly out of coin and his boots were so worn and his body so tired. He rested more often on the road, staggering off into the bushes or behind an outcrop to curl up and sleep. When he ran out, he had decided he would simply let himself expire.

* * *

 Fenris knew he was close. At the last town, several people remembered seeing a tall blond man in somewhat ill-fitting garb, clothes that looked worn and threadbare.

“I thought he was sick,” one woman had told Fenris, eyeing his bare feet and fearsome markings nervously. “He seemed a little dazed, and left. This was yesterday afternoon. I haven’t seen him back.”

Fenris thanked the woman, hoisted his pack, and pressed on down the road pointed out to him. He could come across Anders at any time. Fenris’s feet dragged, dirty and caked in dust from his travels, but he went on doggedly, refusing to give up until he found his mage.

* * *

Anders thought perhaps he was done for this time. He wanted to close his eyes and simply drift away on dreams. He lay on his side, curled up in the sheet he slept under. Evening was falling quickly, purple shadows stretching ever longer around him. Anders’ eyes fluttered open. He wasn’t quite asleep yet.

“Mage?”

Great, now he was hallucinating.

“I must be really far gone,” Anders muttered. He took some comfort in knowing that it was Fenris’s voice that came to him when he was nearing his end, though.

“Anders!” The voice seemed closer. Either this was a really realistic hallucination, or—Anders opened his eyes.

There in front of him, undeniably real, was a pair of bare feet. Dirty feet. Elf feet. Feet that looked well-battered from traveling. Fenris’s feet. Fenris.

“Anders, forgive me,” Fenris said, kneeling, “whatever I did to make you think I did not love you.”

“Fenris, I’m so sorry,” Anders said, pushing himself upright. “It has been torture without you.”

Fenris smirked a little.

“That is a high estimation then,” he said, “as I know that you have experienced something like it before.”

“I don’t want to talk about mage rights,” Anders said wearily, rubbing at one eye and then trying to pull back his messy hair. It had gotten long and unruly.

“I don’t either, surprisingly,” Fenris said, his voice getting soft and gentle as he moved to sit next to Anders, still facing him. “You look terrible.”

“I _feel_ terrible.”

“You also look beautiful.”

“Not next to you.”

“I’m nothing without you,” Fenris said, turning so he sat alongside Anders. He stretched out his feet and wrapped an arm around Anders, pulling him close. As Anders rested against Fenris’s shoulder, Fenris opened his pack and pulled out—Anders gasped. His embroidered pillow. He had considered it lost.

Fenris placed the pillow on his lap and gestured to it with a sweep of his hand.

“You may rest,” He said, and Anders gratefully laid his head down on the pillow, touched enough to start crying when Fenris began to run his fingers carefully through Anders’ hair, carefully untangling the knots.

“Your mansion—” Anders started, feeling guilty suddenly.

“I sold it.”

“You—”

“I needed you,” Fenris said. “What do you say we find somewhere new? Make up for leaving each other. Make a life together?”

“Fenris…”

“You can think about it.”

Anders looked straight ahead. He saw the trees, deep shadows and dying embers of the sunset. The long grass nodding gently. Fenris’s feet, the lyrium lines nearly covered with mud and dried blood, callouses and barely-healed cuts, and all coated in dust. Fenris had come all this way for him. He loved him.

“I love you, Fenris.”

“Mage,” Fenris said, and the gentle way Fenris’s fingers combed through his hair, lingering along his temple, spoke his love.

“Your feet are dirty,” Anders commented.

Fenris laughed, and _oh_ how Anders had missed that laugh.

“I know,” Fenris said. “I don’t care.”

Anders smiled.

“Me either,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I was too much of a—” He gasped as Fenris leaned down and simultaneously pulled his head up for a kiss. It had been too long.

“You talk too much, mage,” Fenris said. Anders sank back and knew that he would spend the rest of his life with Fenris. He’d never be foolish enough to let this bliss go again.


End file.
